Adding liquid nitrogen to cocktails and ice cream may seem so last year, but one Koreatown joint is taking a different spin by giving you the ability to breathe smoke out of your mouth and nostrils like one of Daenerys Targaryen’s dragons.
Chocolate Chair’s Dragon’s Breath dessert is basically a venti-sized cup filled with colorful cereal puffs that taste kind of like Froot Loops. Liquid nitrogen is poured all over the cereal, flash freezing it and creating a fog that spills out as if it’s coming from a bubbling cauldron. Skewer the sweet and crunchy puff, toss one into your mouth, and you’ll start breathing out a cloud of smoke for a few seconds.
Everyone else sitting at Chocolate Chair was giggling and Snapchatting videos of themselves breathing out the vapor. The mist surprisingly lasts for a long time, though the best time to get your videos in would be right when you’re handed the dessert.
Patrons get the option of purchasing extra dipping sauces to add a little pizzazz to the cereal. The milky sauce come in a variety of flavors, from strawberry to chocolate and rose. Illyanna Prebula, who works at the shop, says it’s a mixture of nonfat yogurt and syrup. The flavors are very light, but it does add a little moisture to the otherwise dry and sugary sweet dessert. If we usually eat cereal with milk, it only makes sense that we’d dip these puffs into the sauces.
Do heed the shop’s many warning signs written in all caps and red about the dangers of straight-up ingesting liquid nitrogen. While you can safely eat the cereal puffs because the liquid coating them have evaporated into gas, do not drink or touch the liquid nitrogen sitting at the bottom of the cup—something that will also eventually evaporate. What do we say to the god of death? “Not today!”
Also, you should just hold onto the cardboard sleeve on the frosty cup instead of directly pressing your fingers against the plastic. I learned the cold, hard way.
Chocolate Chair—a liquid nitrogen ice cream and shaved ice shop that shares the same space with a beauty supplies store—has been whipping up Dragon’s Breath for years now, but a viral video of it recently surfaced online, drawing in long lines. So, if you want to be like Puff the Magic Dragon, be prepared to wait.
